Practices

Overview

Kenneth Lench is a partner in
Kirkland's Government & Internal Investigations Practice Group in the
Washington, D.C.
office.
His practice focuses on representing, and conducting internal investigations
for, financial services and public companies relating to matters
before the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other Federal, state
and
self-regulatory organizations (SROs). Ken handles
matters in all of the major programmatic areas of the securities laws,
including complex securities transactions, financial and accounting fraud,
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, frauds by broker-dealers, hedge fund
advisers and other asset managers, insider trading, and market manipulations.
Ken also
represents boards of directors and associated committees, as well as senior
executives and other employees, of these companies.

Prior to joining Kirkland, Ken
served for 23 years in several positions at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
In his
last role at the SEC, Ken served as Chief of the Structured and New Products
Unit of the Division of Enforcement, which was created in 2010 as a specialty
group of more than 45 professionals nationwide focusing on abuses in markets
for complex securities, including asset-backed securities and derivatives. In
that role, he was responsible for building and managing the unit and supervised
wide-reaching investigations into markets for collateralized debt obligations
and residential mortgage-backed securities, resulting in $1.7 billion in
recovered funds for investors in those products.

Ken previously held various senior
positions at the SEC's
Enforcement
Division including assistant director, assistant chief counsel, branch chief
and
senior counsel, during which time he supervised and conducted numerous complex
and wide-reaching investigations into violations of the Federal securities
laws. As
an
assistant director, Ken
spearheaded
the SEC's major auction rate securities matters, which resulted in some of the
largest settlements in SEC history and, in all, provided for more than $60
billion in liquidity to tens of thousands of investors.

Besides his
extensive Enforcement
Division
experience, Ken served a stint in the SEC's Division of Corporation
Finance, where he reviewed registration statements, proxy materials
and
periodic reports involving initial public offerings, secondary offerings,
tender offers, mergers and acquisitions, going-private transactions, shelf offerings
and
proxy contests.
Ken was
in private practice prior to his arrival at the SEC.